VISAKH MENON

CHRISTOPHER SAUNDERS

July 8 - August 9

The gallery is delighted to present a two-artist exhibition of paintings by New York based artists Visakh Menon and Christopher Saunders.  Menon's acrylic on panel paintings are joined by small scale oil paintings on linen by Saunders.  The artists share a common exploration of repetition, line, and color.

Visakh Menon's labor intensive abstract paintings are inspired by glitched images of photographic scenes and video. Menon is interested in the relationship between technology and painting.  Working entirely by hand, the artist adds layers of fine lines and sections of paint into overlapping planes marked by blurred sections of color and shifting lines in varying densities.  His square panels call to mind early computer monitors, cityscapes, and corrupted images that are repeatedly overlaid and compressed.

Christopher Saunders shares Menon's interest in repetition, minimalism, and digital space.  His paintings refer as much to repeated horizon lines in an actual landscape as they do to atmospheric fragments captured on screen and in print.  In this new series of small paintings, Saunders focuses on repetitive hues which he varies in tonal gradients across the surface.  Like Menon, Saunders relies on precise lines to demarcate his surfaces.  His horizontal strokes of black suggest repeated horizons and tidelines that parse atmospheric fades of subtle color.

 Visakh Menon was born in Kochi, India in 1980 and lives and works in Queens, New York.  He received a BS in Visual Communication from Bharathiyar University, Coimbatore, India, 2000, and an MFA in Graphic Design from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2007.  His works have been exhibited at 1 x 1 Gallery, Dubai, Nature Morte Gallery and BluePrint12 Gallery, New Delhi, India, Gallery OED, Kochi, India, Marfa Works on paper, Marfa,TX, and Farleigh Dickinson University Art Gallery, Teaneck, NJ, among other venues.  Menon is a 2023 artist in residence at the Institute of Electronic Art, Alfred University, Alfred, NY.  He is currently an Adjunct Lecturer at New York City College of Technology - CUNY, Brooklyn, NY.

Christopher Saunders was born in Franklin, Virginia in 1972, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.  He received an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, in 1997 and a BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA in 1995.  His works have been exhibited at Kristen Lorello, NY, Allegra LaViola Gallery, New York, and Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, East Hampton, New York, as well as Geary Contemporary, Millerton, New York, Bicycle Fine Art, New York, NY, Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, and Davidson Contemporary, New York, NY.  Saunders is a 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Painting.  He is the recipient of a Robert Watts Scholarship Award, Rutgers University and received a Graduate Fellowship Award for Drawing from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  The artists' works are included in the collection of the James Hotel, New York, NY, and Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, among others.